Full transcript of “Beginner's Guide to Excel for Mac”. Click a timestamp to open the video at that moment. Need another video? Use the YouTube transcript generator.
0:00 this is the beginner's guide to Microsoft Excel for Mac and my goal in this tutorial is to cover everything that you need to know to get started effectively using Microsoft Excel on a Macintosh computer so let's dive right in and get started I'm gonna go down here to my dock and find Excel and I'll click it to open it up now if you don't have it on your dock that's okay you can simply go up here and do a search for Excel and if it's on your Mac you should be able to pull it up and launch it just by clicking you'll notice when you open Excel typically you'll get this window that has a list of templates that you could choose from and it also has a blank workbook in the upper left corner
0:45 and you can browse through these and see what's available the templates are very handy you can click to get for example an annual financial report and it's got some bogus numbers in there but you just go in replace the numbers with your own numbers and you've got a good spreadsheet here's a time sheet for a small business let's say or for an employee an invoice template just some really useful templates if you don't see one there that you're interested in just go up here to search all templates and I could look for let's say a family budget I type in budget and it brought up a whole bunch but there is family budget and I can just double click on that to open it up and that quickly I have a spreadsheet all I have to do is click to replace the content that's there with my own content
1:30 all right so templates are pretty useful but I know that's probably not why you're here most of you probably need to use Excel for work and in many cases somebody else has created the spreadsheet and you just need to use it and add to it and understand it so let's take a look at what you need to know to be able to understand and use Excel I'm gonna click here where it says blank workbook I'll just double click on that and it opens up with a completely blank Excel workbook and I prefer to go completely fullscreen I'm just gonna double click here in the upper left corner and that should do it if you have a modern Mac computer you can just double click on a corner and it should maximize if you can't do it that way you could just get the corner here and click-and-drag to maximize and fill the screen okay so there's my workbook
2:17 and the first thing I want to teach you is the anatomy of Excel I want you to really understand what it is you're looking at and what you're seeing when you use Excel and so the first term that I want you to learn is workbook the workbook is all of this and similar to most books this book is made up of a series of pages or sheets and in excel we call them sheets so we have sheet one now later if I wanted to I could click this plus sign to get sheet two and again to get sheet three etc but these sheets together collectively they make up the workbook now each sheet and I'm gonna click back on sheet 1 each and
3:03 every sheet is made up of a series of columns and rows and I'm going to adjust the view a little bit I'm gonna click here on the View tab and this view ribbon appears and I can zoom in let's say to a hundred and fifty percent just so that you can see this just a little bit better so you can see we have an eighth column a B column a C column all the way over to the right I could keep going until we get to Z and then look what happens when you get to Z it goes to a a a b a c so you can just keep going to the right there is a limit of some sort but it's pretty high how far it goes and the same is true of rows except rows are numbered they don't have a letter associated with them they have a number so I have rows 1 through 27 but
3:51 if I scroll down the page you can see it goes to 200 it goes to 500 it goes to 5,000 it goes much much further than that now the nice thing about having columns and rows with letters and numbers is that it provides us an opportunity not only to describe a column by saying go to column E or look at row 10 but it also gives us the ability to describe any one of these boxes in Excel and the term for these rectangles is cell each these is a cell and each one has a name so for example this rectangle here has a name it's a very specific name this is
4:37 cell e9 it's just the intersection of the column and the row that's a nine okay so let's review real quick so far we have a workbook that's all of this we have sheets that make up the individual pages let's say of the book on the sheet we have columns we have rows and we have the intersection of columns and rows that we call a cell now what about this what about more than one cell that's together the name for this is range a range and it's also possible to name a range the way you would name a range in excel is you would start in the upper left corner of the range and say the name of that cell in the upper left
5:23 corner so e for this is cell e4 next you would put in a colon and the colon represents the word through so for colon through cell h-11 that's how you would write the name of this range now as you progress throughout this video and also the next video the intermediate excel for mac video you'll understand why this is important but for now let's stop there with describing the anatomy of an actual workbook and worksheet alright next let's look at the interface of Excel not the anatomy of the spreadsheet itself and the workbook itself but rather the layout of the tools and the options so you'll notice that there are
6:11 a series of tabs okay each of these tabs when you click the tab produces a different ribbon across the page and the ribbon displays different options that you might want to use so I can go to the data tab and ribbon and there are a bunch of options that I see there you'll notice that some of these options are grouped together using these vertical lines those lines are meant to separate different groups basically of options and tools trying to keep similar tools together above that you'll see some quick buttons there's a file button if you want to quickly open up a spreadsheet there's the Save button there's an undo button and there's a repeat button in
6:58 this case repeat whatever you did last and we have a customize quick access toolbar button that's kind of interesting and then if you look above that as is typical with most Mac programs you can see that if you click and drag you can separate the window here from the toolbar across the top but this toolbar does have a few other options on it you can go up here to find what version of Excel you have I have 16 points something you can go up here to file and get some of those same options that we looked at earlier edit insert and so on so there is a little bit of a duplication you can go to insert here for example or you can click here for insert now if you ever accidentally click on a tab that's already activated so this tab has been clicked on the
7:44 ribbon is showing if I click on that tab again look it hides the ribbon and the options so if that ever happens just click insert again and it comes back ok now that you've learned the interface of excel for mac and you've learned the anatomy of a spreadsheet and of a workbook you're ready to learn how to create some data in Excel and so for this data I would like to create an inventory of the games that we have at my house the board games the card games etc and in order to do that I'm going to select to effect and that's a phrase that you should write down you should memorize it select to effect in excel if you want to affect the data here in the spreadsheet you have to first select something you must select in order to effect what's there so I would like to
8:31 select a one cell a1 and type family game inventory so I selected that cell and typed now I'm going to tap return on the keyboard I tap return and look what happened it entered officially that text into cell a1 and in addition to that it moved mice election down one so now cell a2 is selected and that means that Excel now is ready for me to type something in the next cell so I would like to type boggle one of the best all-time word games in my opinion I type boggle and then I tap return and it moves down underneath boggle I'm gonna type code names which is a really fun game that I recently bought for my family and then I tap
9:17 return and it moves down and I'm just gonna continue to add games to this list so give me a minute to do so and then I'll resume the video okay so there's my list of games and of course we have more than this but these are some of our favorites and my spreadsheet is looking pretty good but as you can see there are some problems first of all you'll notice that it looks like this data in this case the names of these games the data is spilling out of column a and over into column B at least that's what it looks like in reality that's not the case and I can prove that by going to cell b1 clicking and typing I'll just type hello there and you'll notice that the phrase family game is still there if
10:03 I double click it shows that family game inventory so I haven't overwritten the word inventory by entering hello in cell b1 I'm gonna delete that and so even though it looks like the names of these games are spilling over into column B that's not actually the case but still it is kind of annoying and it makes it hard to read this data and so I would encourage you to try to fix problems like this to make your data easier to read and understand so let's look at a couple of ways you could do that right here between column a and column B there's a line that separates them if I click and hold to the mouse click I can drag that line to the right and it adjusts the column width so you can see now all of the games fit inside
10:50 of the column now just so you know you can do the same thing with rows you can make rows taller if you want to in this case I do not want to do that so I'll just go up and click undo and so that's one way to adjust column widths clicking and dragging there's actually a faster way that I to know about and what that is is if I double-click on the line between column a and column B it will automatically resize to be just the right width to fit everything that's in the column and so that's a nice trick to know all right now next what I want to do is establish the kinds of data about these games that I want to track so for example here in cell b1 I'm gonna select it to affect it and I'm gonna type the first thing that I'm gonna track about each of these
11:36 games and that is ratings so I'm gonna rate these games from 1 to 5 5 meaning it's a great game alright so I'm gonna go here and I'll click and I'll put boggle as a 4 now if I tap return notice just like before that the selection moves down now I want you to know if you hold shift when you tap return look it goes up instead of down so shift return goes up return goes down and while we're talking about this I want you to know that if you tap tab the tab key then the selection moves to the right and I bet you can guess how to move to the left it's shift tab that moves you to the left so those are some keyboard shortcuts that help you to move the selection where you want it to be next to ratings I'm gonna track the cost of
12:23 the games and the location in the house and finally the number of players and I'll hit enter all right now notice I made a mistake there I misspelled the word players to fix this I can do it one of a couple of ways I can click once to get on this cell II won because as soon as I type anything in this cell look everything that was already there is erased so I would have to type everything all over again number of players so that's one way to fix a mistake like that but let's look at a second way if I double click on a cell I'm no longer on the cell I'm inside the cell and so I want you to notice the difference between the two when I clicked twice it got me inside
13:08 the cell and now look I can use the arrow keys to move within the cell to the exact place where I want to make an edit in this case I want to delete the Z and replace it with an S and then hit return so that's a distinction that's pretty important click once to get on a cell and if you do that anything that you type will erase what was previously there the other option is to double click that gets you inside the cell and you can make fine-tuned adjustments to the contents of that cell now there are a few changes that I want to make to this this is looking good but something's bothering me a couple of things really the first thing is I would really like this where it says family game inventory I don't really want it where it is I want it to be basically the title of
13:53 this data I want it to be above it and to display you know the title or the purpose of this data so to do that I wish I had another row above rule number one well the way you get another row is by right-clicking on the row that is just below where you want the new row to appear so right click on that row number and then click insert and it inserts a new row above now you can do the same thing with columns right click on column D insert and it inserted a column just to the left of column D I'm gonna undo that so now that I have a blank row I can click on family game inventory and I'm gonna cut it I'm gonna hold the command key and tap X that selects and
14:38 cuts what was there and then I'm gonna select a one click on the cell and then hold command and tap V for paste and yes you could right click copy right click paste that works too now that I have the title for this data above the other information I can do what's called a merge and center so I'm gonna click on cell a1 and drag across all of the data and at this point anyway the data only goes to column E so I'm gonna stop there and then I'm gonna go to the Home tab the home ribbon and this is where you find the most commonly used options in excel for mac and so I go to that home tab home ribbon and look there is merge and center so I select that button and
15:25 notice what it did it broke down the cell walls between cell a1 b1 all the way through it broke down those barriers and this is a great way to basically put a title over your data now that I've done that I can also make this stand out and really shine as a title by going up to again the home ribbon and choosing some text options like bold underline if I want to I don't want to you can italicize you could make the text bigger if you want to you could change its color and you could even put in a background color if you really want to do that which I think I will that looks pretty good the other thing that's bothering me is this phrase number of players okay at first I'd like
16:12 to capitalize the letter P there we go and secondly again it looks like it's spilling out of its column and I could fix that manually or automatically but I want you to see a shortcut that's really great and that is if you click and drag all the way across your data you can then double click between any two columns it doesn't matter which one's just double-click and all of them will be perfectly resized to be just big enough to fit their data now in this case that might be too narrow so I'm gonna click and drag and adjust a little bit and look all of them will be identically resized to the exact same width and from there I can click out and then make adjustments to make sure everything looks the way I want it to look okay this is great give me a couple
17:00 of minutes to continue to put in my ratings the cost and the data and then I'll resume the video so there's my data and you can see this is a great way to track information excel is great for inventories but there's so much more that you can do with it in addition to inventories and so now I've got this great pretty useful inventory of my games and as the number of games grows I can just continue to fill in the data clicking on or in a cell to enter the information I can tab to the right shift tab to the left enter to go down shift enter to go up and I can just enter the data that I want into this sheet then I can use the formatting that I showed here on the home tab to format the data I can change the
17:47 column widths either individually or all simultaneously and much more and at this point we're gonna save so to do so I just go up here to the upper left corner and I can either click this quick save or I can click file save and that's what I want to do in this case file save it takes me to my computer and I'm just gonna navigate around my computer by clicking on the part of the computer where I want to save it it actually took me to the perfect spot so I'll just name this spreadsheet family game inventory and simply click Save so now to get back to the spreadsheet let's say in a month or a week I can just open up Excel and I should be able to go here to recent and find it there at the top so I hope that
18:32 you found this video to be helpful at this point you've learned everything that you need to get started entering data into excel and doing some basic formatting of the data so I hope you found this video to be helpful if you did watch for a future tutorial that I'll make on intermediate excel tips and tricks for Mac and if you did find this video to be helpful please click the like button below and consider connecting with me on my social media websites like Facebook Pinterest and Twitter and definitely do subscribe to my youtube channel for more videos about technology for teachers and students and watch for another video from me at least every Monday if you're interested in learning about these excellent games that are listed here please look in the description below and if you'd like to support my youtube channel please
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